I'm a writer. I most recently worked as an analyst, and before that at Business Insider, where I co-created BI Intelligence, the company's market research service. I'm also a business and economics columnist at Atlantico and a lecturer at HEC Paris business school and a mentor at startup accelerator programs SeedCamp and Le Camping. I live in Paris with my beloved wife and daughter.

But he is still a man of outstanding talent who can be useful to his country.

What should he do next?

Unlike John McCain and John Kerry, he doesn’t have a Senate perch to fall back on to build a statesmanlike legacy. Unlike Bob Dole, he doesn’t need to endorse products on TV. It’s hard to imagine him, Gore-like, as a documentarian-crusader for issues of global importance.

Obviously, he might return to the two endeavors that defined much of his adult life, and always seemed to bring out the best in him: business and Church leadership. Or, at 65, he could go into well-earned retirement and focus on his family (though I don’t see a sinecure as likely for the inventor of the Romney Olympics).

But there are two options that I’ve always been interested in.

(The first one, which is really a fantasy, would be to have Mitt Romney become Secretary of Defense. I always thought Romney was too unprincipled for the Presidency, but his CEO background made him perfect to whip into shape that bloated, lumbering, incomprehensible bureaucracy, the Pentagon, as we wind down our overseas adventures. Politically, it would be a coup for President Obama to appoint his former challenger to a top cabinet post, like he did with Hillary Clinton in ’08. But I’m aware that the two men have too much enmity for the idea to be realistic.)

My second option for Mitt Romney’s future, however, is much more realistic. It would draw on the strengths that always made him most appealing as a public figure: his well-documented data nerdery, his venture-capitalist background, his policy entrepreneurship (Romneycare was, after all, a great political success).

Here’s the idea: Mitt Romney should fund and run a foundation dedicated to fostering and researching new, innovative right-of-center policy ideas.

The foundation should have an entrepreneurial, VC-type mindset. It would not be a traditional think tank, pushing policy papers, but rather a laboratory that funds interesting thinkers and initiatives on a broad range of ideas. More New America Foundation and Kauffman Foundation, less Brookings and AEI. Ideally, it should not be based in DC (perhaps New York, or Romney’s adoptive hometown of Boston?).

In this context, Mr Romney’s ideological malleability would be an asset, not a liability. The foundation’s goal would not be to push for a particular strand of conservatism, but to foster new ideas (and new thinkers) in every strand. The foundation should simultaneously fund investigations into, say, how to reduce abortions without legal restrictions, and how to implement restrictions; how to improve healthcare coverage with a mandate, and without.

It is crucial that Romney makes clear this foundation would not be an underhanded way to lay the groundwork for a third presidential run, as it would immediately be contaminated beyond repair by such a perception. As such, his role should be more “chairmanlike” than as a day-to-day manager, which would also give him enough time to do the other things I mentioned he might want to do.

Mitt Romney’s time as a frontline politician is over. He now has a legacy to build. At 65 and with a healthy lifestyle, he is still in his prime.

What the Republican Party and the conservative movement need above all is not a new coalition or to become “more moderate” or “more conservative” or “more libertarian”–it is imagination. It is new, fresh ideas. Plenty are there for the taking (readers know my favorite source) and need to be promoted; plenty need to be invented. It was a lack of fresh ideas that forced Mitt Romney into the straight-jacket of “Generic Republican” and led to his downfall. Fresh ideas won’t be enough to make the Republican Party a majority party, but without fresh ideas it will never become a majority party.

In the end, Mitt Romney’s father was remembered foremost, not as a failed presidential candidate, but as a civil-rights campaigner. Mitt Romney has belonged to a broad ideological movement his entire life. If he works at it, he may ultimately be remembered as the man who breathed new intellectual life into the movement, not the one who led it to defeat.

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